Gallery: WeWork's Radical Plan to Remake Real Estate With Code
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WeWork provided WIRED with a handful of renderings that illustrate the BIM process, as seen in-house. Here's a set of metrics used by the physical environments team to determine how many members can sit, comfortably, on a floor.
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BIM models allow for a more holistic understanding of what's in a building. “When you go to a normal architecture firm they aren’t going to be innovative in terms of their systems,” WeWork co-founder Miguel McKelvey, says, by way of explaining the Case, Inc. acquisition. “They’re not going to be thinking of the whole lifespan of this project, or how do we document every single light bulb, or every product, so that when a chair breaks in a conference room, we can replace it right away.”
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WeWork's architects are starting to run prototypes now to see how designers can access real-time information about how certain materials, in a given market, affect a project’s overall budget.
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Part of the appeal of BIM is how precisely it lets architects prototype out spaces. A 3-D BIM model gives you the ability to see the layers of material in a building and sidestep conflicts before the building gets built.
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WeWork favors older buildings that have a bit of a patina to them. The floors might be uneven, the walls crooked, and the plumbing due for an upgrade. “These old buildings might have drawings, but they might be off by a foot or two,” says Dave Fano, who oversees a 160-person “physical products” team at WeWork. 3-D models are more exact.
